The City of the Living

By: Nicola Lagioia, translated by Ann Goldstein

A spellbinding, best-selling work of true crime about one of the most shocking murders in recent Italian history and set in a Rome that will be a constant revelation to anyone who knows only the city’s well-worn tourist paths.

In March 2016, in a nondescript apartment on the outskirts of Rome, Manuel Foffo and Marco Prato, two “ordinary” young men from good families, brutally murdered twenty-three year old Luca Varani. News of the seemingly inexplicable crime sent shockwaves through Rome and beyond. What motivated such extreme violence? Were the killers evil or in the grip of societal evils? Did they know what they were doing? Or were they possessed? And if the latter, possessed by what?

Going beyond anything that has ever been written on the crime, based on months of interviews, court documentation, and correspondence with the killers themselves, The City of the Living not only reads like a fast-paced, revelatory thriller in the style of Lisa Taddeo’s Animal but is also a descent into the dark heart of Rome—a city plagued by corruption, drugs, hidden violence that sometimes erupts.

Nicola Lagioia leads us through a maze of betrayed expectations, sexual confusion, inability to grow up, economic grievances, crises of identity—progressively tightening the focus of the analysis to locate the point after which anything is possible. As hypnotic as Erik Larson’s Devil in the White City, an heir to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, The City of the Living is Nicola Lagioia’s most gripping, bestselling, and critically acclaimed book to-date, the story not only of a crime but of a society and the human natures that make such a crime possible.